Word: jiveass
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...Copehagen, however. Jiveass (or Anthony Miller, as he is now calling himself) finds himself spending his days in the Drop Inn restaurant having long intellectual discussions with fellow expatriate blacks, and his nights in bed with a series of white women who come equipped with all sorts of far-out perversions (sexual and otherwise) that seem guaranteed to strip away all of his carefully prepared defenses. The novel gets progressively more manic as the two worlds begin to collide and intersect and Jiveass finds that even the lies no longer mask the absurdity of his situation or help to give...
...shattered fragments of Jiveass' philosophy finally come together when he regains consciousness after a fist fight having to do with the question of his only friend's alleged homosexuality. Jiveass sees homosexuality as a destructive form of weakness designed to rot a man's identity out from under him-just as he see his own relations with white women as a way of prostituting himself and submitting to the white world, rather than attacking it and identifying himself as one with his blackness...
...WHICH, to use Mr. Jiveass Nigger's expression, is cool. Very, very cool. The hero, George Washington, can now walk off into the sunset, feeling very beautiful inside, knowing he can make it on his own terms and tell the white world to go sit on its own white ass. The author, however, has seen to it that the reader is not left in quite so secure a position. He has made quite sure that you never know where you stand in relation to the book; although one minute you may be laughing with him at all the jive...
...style and general format of the novel are easy and without interruption; yet somehow, amid the general flow of things, realities are contorted, perspectives tiltcrazily, and the whole tone of the novel can shuttle back and forth from snide humor to outright malevolence. "All is jive," says Mr. Jiveass Nigger, and from the beginning of the book until its end, you're never quite sure if you might not just be the one who's being jived...
...sure as you are a jiveass nigger, some well-meaning intellectuals will be picking through your soul... will be picking through your dirty drawers, and undoubtedly some frail lady will turn your dead cock over with the tip of her Scripto looking for "meaning." But they will not find it here, not the same meaning they find in fine "homes" in the Berkeley hills, Wall Street, PepsiCola, Perry Como, Toilets, Nixon, crew cuts, and Cadillacs. You will have them understand what you mean by jive...